Page 99 of The Love of My Life
I stare at him. ‘You mean, she admitted it?’
Charlie swallows, then nods.
I slump back into the sofa. I wish I could be closer to Leo, to cling on to him before I get swept away, but he’s sitting at the other end of the sofa, and I have no idea if he’ll ever hold my hand again.
Jeremy looks destroyed.
‘Dad had no idea,’ Charlie says, following my gaze.
I want to believe what I have just read.
I do not want to believe what I’ve just read.
Charlie leans back in our armchair. ‘I started university last September. When I came home for the Christmas holidays Mum wasn’t herself at all. Very up and down, weirdly angry. Dad said she’d been that way since I’d left for Boston.’
John comes and scrabbles at the back door, which stops Charlie in his flow. Leo gets up and lets the dog in.
‘When I came back for the Easter holidays she was even worse. Sort of ultra-needy, but also just – I dunno – just furious. Not just with us, necessarily, just generally.’ He scratches his head. ‘It was a dick move, but one night she left her diary by the loo in her en suite and I picked it up. Mum’s written diaries my whole life and I’ve always respected her privacy, but – well, fuck it, I was worried.’
Charlie pauses. ‘Sorry. Mum and Dad don’t mind me swearing. Do you?’
‘Of course not.’
‘So I read a few pages. She sounded quite unstable. And I was about to put it back when I read something I didn’t like. Essentially a reference to all of the stuff you’ve just read.’
He expels a long breath.
‘I read it four or five times, but I couldn’t see what else she could mean. It was about the smothering thing. It sounded like she’d made it up, but I couldn’t quite believe it. I went back to Boston for my summer term, but I kept thinking about it. I suppose I was just hoping I’d misunderstood.’
He pauses. ‘But when I came back for the summer, and went looking for her diaries again, I eventually found the entry you’ve just read.’
I wait. Nothing seems real. Not this room, not the people in it, not the story he’s telling.
‘She admitted it all, when I confronted her. She was in floods. Told me how she’d lost baby after baby, how adoption was their only hope in the end, and how they finally found me ... And then you changed your mind and decided to keep me. I think that broke her.’
The wind picks up outside.
‘So I get it. What an awful time she’d had, in the lead up to that day.’ He looks at me, and I see sadness in his young face. ‘But I still can’t accept what she did. Let alone work out how to forgive it.’
The world is beginning and ending. I lean forward and rest my elbows on my knees.
Is this how it happened?
I was playing peekaboo with my baby?
When I look up again, Charlie’s watching me expectantly, as if waiting for an answer. Leo touches my shoulder.
‘Sorry? What?’
‘I said, have you always thought you tried to smother me?’ Charlie asks. ‘Have you never doubted it?’
I bring up my memories of that day. A torrent of fragments surface, all the usual noise and misery. I find the moment of the pillow, over Charlie’s face. I find the moment I was interviewed by the psychiatrist and the social worker and my nurse. I find the moment they asked if it had been my intention to suffocate my baby. And I find the moment where I looked into myself and said, yes, I think that’s exactly what I was trying to do.
Why did I say that?
Why did I sayI think so, rather than something more assured, like, ‘Yes, that’s exactly what I was trying to do?’
I try out the idea of peekaboo. Of wanting to play, not harm.
